


The value of touch

by down



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Mid-Canon, Sarkan as a background presence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 12:48:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17022921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/down/pseuds/down
Summary: Touch changed, after the Wood.





	The value of touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alianora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianora/gifts).



Touch changed, after the Wood. 

Everything else did, too, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise to Kasia the first time she reached for a spoon with her own fingers that the sensation was strangely muted. At first she thought she'd lost some of the sensation in her hands, the same way that Lidia from two villages along had done when she burned them catching a pot of cooked stew which had tried to tip into the hearth. She had been married barely a month; her husband's parents had been coming to them for the first time since the wedding. "No matter how much you wish to impress someone," she'd told us all, solemnly, "it is not worth your hands." Then she would show us the shiny, reddened skin on her palm and up the two smallest fingers on the right hand, which moved only reluctantly, and with pain. 

The only thing she had touched until then was the bed, which she had been laying on for so long and was muffled through the bedclothes anyway, and Agnieszka. Her Nieshka's skin had still felt warm below her hands, but perhaps that was only because she expected it to be so. Or heat still came through, where metal was only a faint pressure against her fingers; she had certainly felt the fire when they'd burned the wood around her. So she thought, for a moment, struggling to pick up the spoon, that she had done something similar. That being in that tree - that sap, the bark, against her skin - that she just couldn't feel normally.

The spoon shifted on the tray. Kasia closed her fingers harder, to make sure she didn't drop it. A thin snapping sound rang through the room as the shaft broke below her fingers.

Kasia stared at it, breath catching in her throat. At home, spoons were mostly horn (or sometimes wood, though people didn't like to eat from wood in the valley if they could find an alternative - for all they built houses and beds and tools from it, eating utensils were a little more intimate, and made people a little more wary). The Dragon, however, had fine metal cutlery to go with the fine bowls and wall hangings and everything else he surrounded himself with. Kasia thought this was actual silver, the handle made with a pattern so fine she was half-certain it must be the work of magic. There were birds in flight engraved up the middle of the handle, the shaft narrowing down delicately below them. 

One of them had been beheaded where the metal had bent to the point of breaking below her fingers. Through the narrowest point, but it was still hard metal, and she'd not even felt it giving, not the slightest hint of it bending, until it was just… in two pieces, both rocking slightly on the tray from the force of the snap.

Agnieszka - who had been feeding her patiently for she knew not how long, who had braved the Wood for Kasia and called her back with her own heart bare and magic on her tongue - who was still sat in a soup-splattered apron with flour on her face and her hair escaping the half-hearted knot she'd caught it in - her dearest Nieshka stared at the spoon for barely a second before she was snatching the pieces up and shoving them into her pocket.

"I'll fix it, later," she declared as she shot to her feet, rocking the mattress so hard the bowl nearly tilted over on Kasia's lap - she caught it at the last second. "I've broken so many bowls since I got here I've got a whole pile of them to fix. I'm sure there's something in the book - I'll get another spoon, for now."

She was almost at the door before Kasia could call out, tongue heavy in her mouth, and then the only word she could find was Nieshka's name.

Agnieszka turned far enough to throw her a smile that quivered a little at the edges. "I'll be right back," she promised.

Kasia stayed as still as she could, the tray on my lap feeling more a threat. Or her hands resting on it feeling like the threat. She took a breath, and lifted one to her face, making herself look at it - really look.

It was still her hand. There was the faint line of the scar on the side of her palm from one of the few mishaps she'd had climbing her first trees. But the faint lines and whorls of her skin were… different. They looked somehow like the grain of a tree, and as she flinched and her hands twitched, the creases in the way her joints folded were just - wrong. Too smooth, not wrinkling up like real flesh, like a person's hand should.

Her hair, too, was too heavy, clinging to itself as it fell over her shoulder, more like one united mass than a thousand single strands. The wood-like patterns repeated themselves there, too.

Breathing deeply, trying to keep the tide of horror down, bits of memory struck her - of pushing people away in terror and seeing them flung away, of being bound to the bed she sat on still. Wizards had more than mortal strength, or so the tales said, but she could see the Dragon hitting the far wall clearly enough it must have happened. 

That was, oddly, what calmed her, or at least what gave her a grain of calm to seize and focus on. Kasia might be changed, but the Dragon who had watched the wood all these years and fought it back and taken Agnieszka from them without apology, he would have known if she was corrupted. These changes were hardly subtle, and yet he let Agnieszka keep her in this chamber, not the tomb where they'd torn her from the brambles.

 _Unless_ , the thought came creeping in, _unless I was the key, and a thread of corruption caught him?_

But he would have been protected then, as Agnieszka had been. The memory of her own hands on Agnieszka's throat as sap fell from Kasia onto her and could find no way in would not leave her anytime soon, burned onto her memory. Surely the Dragon, the most powerful wizard in all the land, would have been better protected still. More, she rationalised, slowly, it had been a fair while since that day. Too long for the Wood to wait if it had got claws into the Dragon. That malevolent force was too eager for their destruction, and if it had taken him, there would be little that could stop it.

Kasia had dreamed of traveling, of the world open before her, choosing every day where she could go once her ten years were up, and coming back every winter; coming home to her family, to Agnieszka. When the Dragon had taken her away instead, that dream had faded, but she hadn't quite given up on it. But now she didn't need a mirror to tell her that she looked strange enough, moved oddly enough, that the world would not be open to her. Even her family might find her too strange. But Agnieszka was still with her. At the end of her ten years - magic or no magic, only ten years had ever been agreed - perhaps she would want to travel too, like the other girls had. 

They could go together - perhaps Agnieszka's magic and her strangeness together would be enough to tip over the line from seeming dangerous into so strange they were a curiosity instead. Then they could come home every winter, as she'd meant to do; if they were too strange for their families to be at ease with them staying too long, Agnieszka could maybe talk the Dragon into letting them stay here. She had talked him into letting her save Kasia, when she should have been lost; Kasia had the feeling she could talk him into more than just a place to stay. 

By the time Agnieszka stumbled into the room again, waving a new spoon cheerfully at her, Kasia was able to smile back at her even if the expression felt strange.

 _Is it worth the price?_ she wondered.

Agnieszka's hand pressed to hers, and she could still feel the warmth of it even with her mutated skin - could still feel the life bright below it. She'd thought she was losing her for a decade, for ever. Instead she was wrapping her hands about Kasia's, smiling when she managed to take the spoon in more tentative fingers without snapping the metal.

Kasia would be a lifetime learning the price paid for her to be here, but sat with Agnieszka smiling encouragement at her, the only answer was yes.


End file.
